Re: Help with setting up man.cgi with nginx

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Aisha,

Aisha Tammy wrote on Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 07:06:46PM -0500:

> I was trying to set up man.cgi to view my manual pages online and
> haven't been able to find a lot of documentation for setting it up.

Did you look at

  https://man.openbsd.org/man.cgi.8

?

> I managed to get the main page to load but its not able to show any
> man pages, only the front page.

I suggest that you inspect the web server logs.  That is the usual
method for debugging non-working web server setups.

> I am on Gentoo and am using the nginx webserver.

This sounds as if your question might be more related to how nginx
works than to man.cgi(8).  I have very little experience with nginx,
so i fear i won't be able to provide much help for that program.

> I am  using the fcgiwrap for passing to man.cgi.
> As man.cgi wants the /man folder to be present and nginx doesnt have chroot

???

To be honest, running a webserver without chroot in 2020 sounds
rather crazy.

In the design of man.cgi, Kristaps and myself did not even consider
supporting non-chroot setups.  It may or may not work, but i don't
feel like spending time on considering whether it might work, or how.

Just use a chroot, as everybody else does, and be done with it,
i would say...

> I had to symlink my /var/www/man to /man (as a temporary work around).
> 
> the folder /man contains a single file - manpath.conf with just a
> single line - system
> 
> the /man/system directory contains man1/ man2/ ... folders with the
> man pages in them.

That sounds good as far as it goes.

Did you remember to do

  # cd /var/www/man/
  # makewhatis system

after copying the manual pages into the system/man1/ system/man2/ ...
directories?

> But when I go to http://localhost , while I can see the main page, clicking on
> any of the links man.cgi(8) or apropos(1) just shows the same page.
> 
> Can anyone point out what I am missing.
> 
> nginx.conf:

I fear i can't reasonably comment on nginx or fcgiwrap.

Yours,
  Ingo
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